Task preemption is a critical mechanism for building an effective multi-tasking environment on dynamically reconfigurable processors. When a task is preempted, its necessary state information must be correctly preserved in order for the task to be resumed later. Not only do coarse-grained Dynamically Reconfigurable Processing Array (DRPAs) devices have different architectures using a variety of development tools, but the great amount of state data of hardware tasks executing on such devices are usually distributed on many different storage elements. To address these difficulties, this paper aims at studying a general method for capturing the state data of hardware tasks targeting coarse-grained DRPAs. Based on resource usage, algorithms for identifying preemption points and inserting preemption states subject to user-specified preemption latency are proposed. Moreover, a modification to automatically incorporate proposed steps into the system design flow is also discussed. The performance degradation caused by additional preemption states is minimized by allowing preemption only at predefined points where demanded resources are small. The evaluation result using a model based on NEC Electronics' DRP-1 shows that the proposed method can produce preemption points satisfying a given preemption latency with reasonable hardware overhead (from 6% to 15%).

The multi-process execution in dynamically reconfigurable processors is a technique to enhance throughput by trying to exploit more inherent parallelism of applications. Basically, a total process for an application is divided into small processes, assigned into limited areas of a reconfigurable array, and concurrently executed in a pipelined manner. In order to improve the efficiency of the multi-process execution, a systematic method for mapping processes onto a reconfigurable array consisting of multiple hardware execution units is essential. This paper proposes and investigates a systematic method for mapping an application modeled as a Kahn Process Network onto a dynamically reconfigurable processing array. In order to execute streaming applications in a pipelined manner, the size of Tiles, which is a unit area of dynamically reconfigurable array, and the grouping of processes are adjusted. Using real applications such as DCT, JPEG encoder and Turbo encoder, the impact of different versions mapped onto the NEC Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor on performance is evaluated. Evaluation results show that our proposed mapping algorithm achieves the best performance in terms of the throughput and the execution time.